I know, I know. Why do I remember things that most of us dutifully forget? How come I discuss details that so many prefer to and do commit to the memory deletion bin? These are good questions, often ones I ask of myself regularly. The answer is, I just do, I just do.

Such is the case with my applications for college some twenty-three years ago, the wonderful fall of ’86. I’ve already commented on my wonderful relations with Sylvia Fasulo, my chain-smoking guidance counselor from my MVHS years. But I neglected to discuss what it was like to get letters of recommendation from my MVHS teachers. Because I trusted almost no one in authority, I ended up with only two letters of recommendation, one out of this world, one the equivalent of used toilet paper. For those of you who either are applying to college this year or are parents whose kids are applying to college this year, here’s a lesson in critical discernment.

Of all the former teachers I decided to ask for a letter of recommendation from, I went to Andy Butler. My Pre-Calc (or Higher Math) class the year before might as well have been a study hall with function formulas. Around the end of October ’85, I began to notice what I thought was a strange everyday occurrence. Andy Butler brought a can of the new Diet Coke to class every morning without fail. We met for class during third or fourth period, around eleven o’clock. Well, he never seemed like he was awake considering he was drinking Diet Coke in front of us at a particularly high energy point of the day. The other thing I noticed was that his can seemed to have the same dents in it day after day.

I spent about a week in Butler’s class just figuring out the dents in his can. If his can had been a map, the dents would’ve been in the southeast corner, down and to the right of the red-brown Diet Coke logo (in the white area) and just above the aluminum gray bottom. When I mentioned what I’d seen to the seniors in my class, Adam, Anthony and Richard all thought that I was crazy at first. By mid-November, though, we’d figured out the dents and the truth.

On one of my after-school runs to C-Town in Pelham I stopped at the deli down the street from 616. Butler was there buying three cases of beer for home. It was about 4:30, just ninety minutes after school had ended, and it wasn’t even Friday.

“I’m going through a rough divorce,” he said, before I could say anything. As if I really wanted to know. “I’m sorry,” I said.

As far as my nose was concerned, Butler was getting refills. I’d solved the mystery, which included Butler’s long disappearances from class for no apparent reason.

This is the teacher whom I asked to write one of the most important letters in my then young life. What the inebriated Butler wrote was eighty-four words of qualified support of my pursuit of postsecondary education. I was “a good student” when I “worked hard,” but I could also become “distracted sometimes.”

Not that I felt I had other places to turn, but there were other and better possibilities. I just didn’t allow myself to realize it at the time. I knew I probably should’ve asked someone else — almost anyone else — for a letter. Cuglietto, Flanagan and Warns may well have been better choices. Even some of my senior-year teachers would’ve done better by me. I just didn’t trust anyone who practiced “tough love” like Cuglietto, put on airs like Flanagan, or compared me to Sam or any other student like Warns did. So I went with Butler’s lousy letter, figuring that Meltzer’s would at least tip the balance.

I didn’t get much help from my teachers other than Meltzer. And Meltzer did help out in numerous ways. He helped me get over some of my embarrassment as I wrote my college essays about my life as the adult teenager at 616. I needed to write this type of essay, since I had some explaining to do about my lack of extracurricular activities. Meltzer helped me interpret the multi-page green-and-white financial sheet that I picked up from the local welfare office outlining my mother’s income between ’83 and ’86, figuring out that my mother’s average income was $16,600 per year as a welfare recipient.

He also set up an interview with a Columbia University alum living in the Wykagyl section of New Rochelle, a rich neighborhood full of small mansions and near a professional-level golf course and country club. The pompous fool seemed as interested in intimidating me with his soliloquy about Columbia’s great traditions as he was in helping me get in. He never asked why someone like me would want to attend. I guess he thought that of course this Black boy would want to go to an Ivy League school like Columbia. “Why do I have to go through this to get into college?,” I thought. I tried to not hold it against Meltzer that I had to witness opulence and arrogance in my college quest.

What Meltzer did that probably helped me most was to bolster my confidence in the college application process. His letter of recommendation was six pages of unrestrained praise. He used so many superlatives to describe my academic success and college potential that I thought that I was the great Dwight Gooden by the time I finished reading it. I was “a great kid,” a “diamond in the rough,” hard-working,” a “critical thinker,” the “best student [he] ever had,” an “intellectual,” smart “beyond belief,” and, well, you get the picture. It made me laugh and blush over and over again after I first read it. I said to Meltzer the next day in the Social Studies Department’s faculty lounge, that “you know more about me than I know about myself.” He just laughed and laughed about that.

It did all work out. Meltzer’s letter — more like a six-page paper on every positive quality I had at the time — more than made up for my lackluster letter from Butler. I should’ve been wise enough to get two letters like Meltzer’s instead of the one. But then again, given where I went to school, I’m not completely sure I had a better alternative.

I admit it. I’m a closet Trekkie, and have been for about thirty-five of my forty or so years here on planet Earth. I watched the reruns of the original Star Trek on WNEW and WPIX (New York area TV stations) from the time that I was five (at least when we had a TV and when I wasn’t a Hebrew-Israelite). I watched the Star Trek cartoon series for the few years that it was on. One of the first movies I ever watched on cable was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I’ve watched series as good at TNG, as interesting as Deep Space Nine, and as critically uneven as Voyager since then. Because I’m also an historian, I have the Star Trek time line in my head, memorized from roughly 1996 to 2380. I’m even willing to give this new-old Star Trek movie that came out earlier this year a chance, even though it’s reeking havoc with the time line once again.

But I feel that it’s time to do something different, something new, with the franchise and with its potential spin-offs (if there will ever be another one) in the future. I reached this assessment based on a experiment I decided to conduct between the end of May and last week. I decided four years after its demise to watch Star Trek: Enterprise from start to finish. I was in between semesters and consulting work in mid-May, flicked on SyFy, and saw back-to-back episodes of the series for the first time. Even though I always liked Scott Bakula, I couldn’t bring myself to watch after reading some horrible reviews, not to mention after my watching the ridiculous movie Star Trek: Nemesis in ’02. After seeing a scene of part of Florida being cut into pieces by some advanced weapon, and Bakula’s character negotiating with sentient reptilians, insectizoids, humanoids, arboreals and amphibians (all related and from the same planet), I decided to see how far down the rabbit hole would go.

Some ninety-eight episodes and 26 DVDs later — thanks to the power of Netflix — I’ve come to the realization that bad writing and limited imagination can really screw up a series, no matter the quality of the acting or the actors. It’s not like the original Star Trek, where there were lots of horrible actors, the scripts weren’t the greatest, but William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and the others from the main cast could carry you through the worst of it. No, this was worse, because the show lacked a clear sense of direction right from the start. Every time it seemed the producers had found a theme, they decided to send us back in time to either alter or maintain the Star Trek time line. Bakula’s character was hit in the head so many times that it’s possible that he could have post-concussion syndrome.

Add to that the attempt to focus Star Trek: Enterprise on a single theme for an entire 24- episode season — the warding off of the Xindi threat to Earth in season three. This was the season it came to be known that a planet had spawn six beings of high intelligence, evolving together from birds, fish/amphibians, arboreals (in this case, sloths), primates/humanoids, insects, and reptiles. I’m convinced that this was when the show jumped the shark. Watching Bakula’s character attempt to have a conversation with a half-sea-lion, half-tuna with sonar language capability was about as idiotic as the show could get.

I stayed with it, though. I couldn’t believe that the show could continue to get worse. And I had the support of the reviewers, who almost unanimously agreed that the fourth and final season was easily the best one. Yeah, it was the best all right. The best of a very, very bad bunch. It was a series of two and three-parters, some a bit interesting, a few actually good and worthy of being compared to the work done by the writers and producers for TNG. All leading to the first interplanetary alliance, a precursor of the Federation. Then, I guess, they learned that the show was canceled, so the scripts became sludgy again, leaving actors to search for emotions they never should have had in the first place, and unnecessarily killing off a main character in the final episode. A last show so cheesy that they brought back TNG veterans Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis (and the voice of Data/Brent Spiner) as their more middle-aged selves to inappropriately close out Star Trek: Enterprise on a holodeck.

Still, I watched. It was so bad at times, that I continued to watch, expecting a twist or turn, a poignant episode, a story line worthy of being followed. Their best story line was the forming of a relationship between the Vulcan science officer T’Pol (played by Jolene Blalock) and Commander Tucker (Connor Trinneer) , the ship’s chief engineer. Even this was more uneven than the eight-year-long affair of Tony Danza and Judith Light on Who’s The Boss! Star Trek: Enterprise was bad, all right, but it was so bad that I had to keep watching.

I kept watching because I liked to be entertained by quality acting with scripts that are both good and forward-thinking, one that’s about imagination and inspiration, about the future and not just about adjusting the precious time line. Star Trek: Enterprise, despite the acting, crashed and burned because it lacked the quality of a dreamer, and I’m not just talking about the late Gene Roddenberry here. It lacked the ability to make me consistency optimistic about a future for humanity beyond our everyday squabbles over money, food and water, our idiotic strife over the social constructions of race, gender, religion and nationalism. I guess it was truly a product of its times, with its first episode coming within weeks of 9/11.

Now that it’s over, I long for a series that can present a vision that raises the level of popular culture discourse the way the original Star Trek did in the ’60s or TNG did in the ’80s and ’90s. Realism is fine, but optimism and forward-thinking embedded in that realism is better. Those are the qualities that keep a series from crashing and burning, even when it does.

This post might be a bit much for many of us. It may well be too much for me. For it’s about some of why I became ambivalent about the academic enterprise. It also describes some of my cynicism — that’s right, cynicism — toward ’60s-style liberals in America, including those whom, as liberal as they may be, aren’t really progressive in any cultural or sociological sense.

You see, I took a class my first semester as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University called Comparative Working-Class History. It was mostly a study of the beaten-down, pre-industrial and Industrial Revolution-era workers who lost their control over the tools of production, and their Marxist-like struggles to regain some control over such tools. Either directly, or through the state (socialism), or through over, violent means. Not that I didn’t sympathize, but I always thought this story too simplistic, not concerned enough with the psychology of human nature or the social constructs under which people are willing to live, even at the expense of their own improvement.

Anyway, the course was taught by a professor whose research looked at the role of Russian women in the economic transition between Czarist Russia and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Although I had no real personal stake in this course initially (I was too busy plotting ways to make all of my courses about multiculturalism, my dissertation topic), I eventually did because of an incident on the first day of class. The Saturday before, August 28, 1993, the great British Marxist E.P. Thompson had passed away. The writer of The Making of the English Working Class (1963) had lived to the age of 69, but apparently had been sick for nearly three years before his death. It was a sad time, for a generation of historians had been influenced by Thompson’s work. His 1963 publication was a cornerstone manual for addressing what most historians now call social history. Unlike so-called socialized medicine, it’s not when the government rewrites history. It’s about people writ large, about how groups of folks have responded to large-scale change, to oppression and exploitation, to difficult if not impossible circumstances.

Certainly Thompson wasn’t the only historian of his time to write in this manner — and hardly the first (anyone ever heard of W.E.B. Du Bois or Franz Fanon?). But for those historians whom had embraced neo-Marxism, if not scholars of color who wrote like neo-Marxists, Thompson was their Edward R. Murrow or Dwight D. Eisenhower. This was also the case of our professor, whom, in discussing E.P. Thompson’s death, her memories of him (more on that later), and his significance to the field, started sobbing in front of the twelve of us. I couldn’t believe it! I wanted to say, “There’s no crying in a graduate seminar!” She was crying as if this were a dear mentor or a close friend. This wasn’t about gender for me, it was about professionalism — she was a tenure-track professor, after all. I knew that there would be some long days in this class after her crying episode.

And they were. All semester, there was a three-way tug-of-war between me (and occasionally, my former Pitt grad school colleague who decided to hop the bridge to Carnegie Mellon to take this course), ten brown-nosing students who’d agree with her despite the evidence, and her. I didn’t expect my now fellow Carnegie Mellon grad students to take my side. But I did expect them to read Thompson and Wilentz and other folks for themselves and not just to get an A out of our professor. There may have been one or two other classes I dreaded more in three years of grad school. Yet I saw no one more unaware of their biases than our professor in this course.

It all came to a head when it was time to discuss David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness (1991) and, indirectly, Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984). Both authors looked at the formation of the White American (and male) working-class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Our professor, as usual, took the stance that the only ideology of significance was one that proclaimed class inequalities the predominant issue explaining the radicalization of the American working-class. Finding this a bit laughable (a mistake on my part), I pressed my argument that at least in the case of US history, race and class distinctions have been and remain intertwined. So much so that a typical neo-Marxist analysis of the American working-class couldn’t apply.

The next two hours were me and my Pitt colleague against ten brown-nosers and our professor. Luckily in my case, I could not only quote Roediger and Wilentz, but Herbert Gutmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a host of other scholars to press home my counterargument. At the end, our professor said to me, in utter exasperation, “I guess we should just go back to original sin.” It meant that I was being a racial determinist, which I suppose was suppose to be an insult as well as her version of “No mas, no mas!”

I learned a lesson beyond my grades or my head-long march toward my doctorate that day. That most so-called liberals in America, whether an assistant professor or an avowed ’60s radical, are really not leftists at all, at least on issues involving race. They may not believe in promoting inequality or racism. But they don’t necessarily see groups of color as actors, activists, or as capable of taking actions independent of their ways of thinking about the world. They explain issues of inequality in ways that actually degrade the achievements of Americans of color who’ve managed to overcome such inequities. In my professor’s case, even as the wife of a prominent soon-to-be Pitt history professor, whose work has helped us as historians better understand the relationship between trade, ideas and economics on four sides of the Atlantic.

Still, the worst thing I learned is that it took Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness to confirm ideas that Du Bois had begun writing about nearly a century before. That, for me, made me apprehensive about wanting to work with scholars who may well see me and my work as well-intentioned, but inferior to theirs. I guess I could’ve cried in despair about this, but I didn’t.

There weren’t a whole lot of things during my Boy @ The Window years outside of 616 that were worse than the guidance — or the lack thereof — I received from my guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo. She was the ultimate Doubting Thomas, one that would probably make Jesus himself shake his head. It wasn’t just that she never thought that I was up to handling any Humanities or AP course while in high school. It was obvious that Fasulo thought that I wouldn’t amount to anything at all. Some of this, I realize, was about race, gender and class — I was a poor Black male, after all, and she was one of the few people that even knew about the poor part (for worse, not for better). But I also knew, even then, that it was about me. Fasulo didn’t believe in me, as a person or a student. When I figured this out, it made my moments in her office a form of torture only slightly above my wonderful moments with my idiot ex-stepfather.

About a week before the start of of high school, in September ’83, I met Fasulo for the first time, as I had to sign up for my freshman year classes. Meeting her was a sure sign that I hadn’t stopped growing. I towered over the four-foot-nine middle-aged woman. But boy could she smoke up a storm! If any of us nonsmokers who had Fasulo as a counselor picked up lung cancer immediately after high school, we should’ve gotten together to form a class action!

I wondered to myself, almost aloud, why Fasulo was a guidance counselor at MVHS. The woman had an A.B. — as some Ivy Leagues and other pretentious universities still call them — from Vassar. Class of ’49 as a matter of fact. Her diploma was on the wall in her small office, letting every one of her students know that she wasn’t exactly from humble beginnings. My first meeting with her was the first of many conversations — or soliloquies I happened to be present for — about her glory days at Vassar.

For the next three years, I put up with her constant “Are sure about…” questions regarding the classes I took. She didn’t think I could handle five Humanities Level 1 courses in a school year. Then she made me get permission from a teacher I despised to take AP American History even though I had the grades necessary to take it. Her always telling me that this class or that class “might be too hard for you,” as if I were a child with a severe mental disability. Fasulo was a piece of work, and I trusted her about as much as I trust law enforcement when they’ve told me that I “fit the description of” so-and-so when I’ve been stopped for walking while Black.

Fasulo’s favorite phrase for me by the beginning of my senior year was, “There goes Donald, always daring to be different.” It referenced my refusal to join our chapter of the National Honor Society and my insistence on carrying three AP courses and applying to schools like Columbia, Yale and the University of Pittsburgh that year. When it came to helping me work through my preparations for college, Fasulo was about as helpful as redneck would be in giving me directions to my White girlfriend on the White side of a Southern town — if I had one at the time, of course.

It’d be an exaggeration to say that Fasulo had it in for me. Yet she wasn’t exactly helping me with good advice about the quality of the schools I wanted to apply to, whether they had good history or computer science departments, or whether the schools had more than a handful of Blacks attending. These were the questions I wanted her to help me answer. I did almost all of that research myself.

What Fasulo was good at was communicating her low expectations of me. She emphasized “safety schools” over and over again, as if I didn’t stand a chance in heaven of measuring up with the more selective schools. “You need to pick a safety school,” she’d say. Or “SUNY Buffalo’s a good safety school,” she said a fair number of times.What, was she going to get a kick-back from someone at SUNY Buffalo for my enrollment there? Per her constant advice on this, I wasted an application and applied there. But not without insisting that Columbia, Yale, and Pitt would stay on my application list. Pitt, of course, was the one school that didn’t fit and the one that Fasulo shook her head about the most. “They’re out of state!,” she said to me in a bit of exasperation about my choices. I explained that the University of Pittsburgh’s out-of-state tuition was actually less than the in-state tuition of any of the New York State schools, and by a wide margin. Not able to resist, Fasulo responded, “There you go again, daring to be different,” adding a frustrated chuckle.

Because of my research, I also ended up applying to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester and Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Five schools in Upstate New York, two Ivy Leagues, and Pitt. No wonder Fasulo was confused. I hated having Fasulo as my counselor at this critical crossroads. She was condescending, demeaning and chain-smoked up my clothes for my troubles. Most of all, I hated having to reveal things about myself to her that I otherwise wouldn’t have shared. Like my family’s financial situation. Fasulo became only the second person I would tell that we were on welfare, that my father and mother had divorced and that he hadn’t made a child support payment since ’78. I had to talk to her about my role in my family as acting first-born child and my responsibilities. It was necessary and humiliating at the same time.

Despite and not because of Fasulo, things worked out for me in the end. Going to Pitt, meeting the people and the professors I’d become friends and colleagues with, was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Still, I had one parting shot from her in the middle of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the holiday season in ’89, and I took time during my time back in Mount Vernon to visit my favorite teacher Harold Meltzer. I had just missed him, but bumped into Fasulo. It was about as fortuitous as having diarrhea and being no where near a toilet or toilet paper.

She asked me where I was in school, and I told her about my considerations for graduate school, law school and the world of work. It was a toss-off sentence, my attempt to end a conversation, not begin one. “Being a lawyer’s hard work,” Fasulo said in response. She then went on to tell me about 70-hour work weeks and billable hours and the bar exam, as if any of this was supposed to be surprising or would somehow scare me. I cut her off, saying “You know, you’re not my counselor anymore, so thanks but no thanks for your advice,” and left her office while she tried to explain her idiotic perspective.

So what’s the lesson here? That we have a strong sense of how to seek wisdom, and from whom, so that we don’t end up going down the wrong rabbit hole in our lives? That short Italian guidance counselors born in the late-1920s have no business advising poor smart Black males? No, the real lesson is that anyone either being paid to advise students or playing that role in some capacity, official or not, has to understand that this isn’t about them, it’s about that student or group of students. When it becomes a way of weeding out students based on some preconception of talent and where that talent fits, that’s when it’s time to seek another job or role, one that doesn’t involve the possibility of damaging someone’s life.